"Over the last few months we have been hard at work getting Native Client ready to support the new Pepper plug-in interface. Native Client is an open source technology that allows you to build web applications that seamlessly and safely execute native compiled code inside the browser. Today, we've reached an important milestone in our efforts to make Native Client modules as portable and secure as JavaScript, by making available a first release of the revamped Native Client .[...]In the coming months we will be adding APIs for 3D graphics, local file storage, WebSockets, peer-to-peer networking, and more. We'll also be working on Dynamic Shared Objects (DSOs), a feature that will eventually allow us to provide Application Binary Interface (ABI) stability."

Yeah, that's my biggest issue with this "online OS" trend too. I think it's all a bit premature until we achieve a state of ubiquitous wireless network connectivity that is as robust and failsafe as the current physical interconnects on the motherboards and processors of today. Not to mention the bandwidth required for full network only computing.

And things like the Canvas-API which allows you to manipulate images in the browser without uploading them to the server. You can choose an image from disk and instead of uploading it to the server manipulate it in the browser first. Maybe even just save it locally.:

On the other hand, having everything synced live is also nice, in case the "local" hardware fails...

There is an interesting article today in the french newspaper "Le Monde" about how the video website Bambuser was the favorite way to share videos amongst Egyptian during the revolution: with this website, you stream the live video (and the website keeps it for future replays), which means even if the police catches you and takes away and destroys your cellphone, the video is already safe on a server...

This is an interesting debate. Sure, you're right that in this case, having the live video stream synced online in real time was the best way to keep the video in safety.

On the other hand, while it works perfectly well for videos with low popularity, I think "breaking" news should not be distributed this way, if the guy cares a bit about his life. Considering how easy it is to locate a cellphone geographically nowadays, including when the guy has gone back home and forgotten to turn it off because he feels in safety, I think that things like sharing the video via freenet later, from a safe place with the lot of time it takes, would be a much better idea.